


You Made This Monstrous Woman

by draculard



Category: CARTER Angela - Works, The Loves of Lady Purple - Angela Carter (Short Story)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-06 02:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17930888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: You carved her out of wood yourself.





	You Made This Monstrous Woman

You made this monstrous woman.

You carved her out of wood yourself. You could have given her any appearance, but you made your choice deliberately. She would have pins in her hair and clothes the color of dead love. She would turn her head and her leathery white skin would gleam, her teeth carved out of mother-of-pearl would reflect light back at the audience, her hair would weigh her head down so much so that an ordinary human woman’s neck would snap under the same weight.

What name could you give a woman like that? Anything, really, but you named her Lady Purple.

Her choice, you said -- the child you named Lady Purple. Her choice at the age of twelve to climb into her foster father’s lap, to ride his cock with pseudo-innocence, like she had no idea what she was doing. Her choice, you said, to slice open the bellies of her parents with a knife meant for fish, her choice to pluck the thigh bone from a murdered man and turn it into a flute, her choice to torture, to seduce, to maim, to humiliate.

Her choice to kill.

Her fall was merely the punishment she’d earned through her own misdeeds. How could the audience do anything but cheer as she fled the stage in rags, as she scavenged cold, grey beaches for the hair of drowned men, as she speared herself on the bloated bodies in the sand? These grotesqueries were the natural results of her misdeeds. Her choices.

But they weren’t her choices.

They were yours.


End file.
